Updates

Today's stupid mistake was not remembering that MCNP's energy bins are described in units of MeV, not eV like those in SCALE are. I was confused why the flux above 20 eV was zero, and I even went and asked two people and was about to forward them my input file before I realized my mistake.

I usually have a hard time being coherent. If I have time to think about something and write it down, and I don't have to write it down very precisely, I'm ok. More formal papers and the like are pretty difficult because one can't get away with the stream-of-thought and highly parentheticalized stuff that I usually write. As far as just talking to my mentor out of the blue, unless I'm prepared with notes, I probably sound like a lunatic.

There have been several seminars that the NSTD puts on; today's was on the ENDF libraries. I don't think any of our classes at school have mentioned the effort that goes into evaluated nuclear data files, or most of the details of resonances and self-shielding and so forth. It was really insightful, and would've been nice to have had at the beginning of the summer instead of now when I'd already learned by trial and error and asking questions what most of the details about the resonance processing code that SCALE uses are.

Ultimate today definitely made up for Monday's. On Monday, there were maybe 20 people there, most of whom didn't seem to enjoy the game. Today, though, there were ten of us at first, with the final head count being 16 by the end of the game. That's the right number so that everyone can stay involved and needs to be involved in order for the game to be good; the field isn't so dense with people that all throwing is unreasonable. It's fun to hit the ground running all-out. And by hit the ground, I mean fall down and slide and look awesome. Not awesome is other people getting confused by thinking my glasses are the frisbee and knocking them off my face. But they're still ok.

And I'm irritated that sonic charges $.30 for a cup of tap water. Pft.